And my little sister Chrissy, for teaching me that life is nothing if you're not obsessed.
To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.
When they throw the water on the witch, she says, “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness”. That line inspired my life. I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.
I don't know how I made those movies. I went out every single night, I smoked pot every single day. I drank. We did everything, but I never became a drug addict or an alcoholic. Other friends are dead, many of them. So many people in this retrospective...in Female Trouble, almost everyone is dead.
How come there's no terrorism with humor, which is a great way to humiliate your enemy? It's a great time for that.
I'm not a separatist, I'm friends with some people who voted for Trump, not many. Nobody has the nerve to tell me, but a few have.
I've bought the same used car from the same man since I was 16 - a Buick every time. They always work, I don't care what color it is. I don't want people to recognize my car in case I want to commit a crime.
I want to be harder to reach, not easier.
I think that in America there is a new movement of underground movies that wants to kick the ass of independent films that they think whine too much.
I go to colleges all the time in America, and everyone's gay, and I think how can this be? And it's only in rich schools. In poor schools, nobody's gay.
I think middle America has changed very, very much. I think people are way more open-minded. I think - I think it's because the Internet. I think they're exposed to so much. All the men talked about how much they love their wife, which I don't hear all the time in art communities.
The worst thing you can do is make a cult movie. That means you got three great reviews and nobody went. An art film means it got a lot of good reviews and nobody went. There is no such thing as a counter culture now. What used to be considered that is commercial now.
No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes. There's no such thing as a good long joke.
To me, beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.
Don’t sleep with people who don’t read.
There is still such a thing as subversive. Subversive makes hip people nervous. It's something new that scares you in a good way. I mean, subversive to me is a compliment. Subversive is something that influences people to do something against society that they haven't thought of before.
Anytime you make someone laugh or satirize something, it's the best way to change someone's opinion because they're defenseless - they laugh, they listen.
What happened is that in the middle of my life I went away and in my own sense of hubris, pride, cynicism, thought, I am an autonomous being in the world, I can control things, I am God.' But my experiment at being God failed! And they do have a great saying in AA: 'Get down off the cross, we need the wood!' And the important thing is to realise you are not the centre of the universe, you are not God.
I built a career on negative reviews. I didn't get a good review ever until Fran Lebowitz gave me a good review in Interview. That was the first good review I got in 10 years.
You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.
I went to the Vatican once - it was a bad idea. I went into the bookshop and I bought hideous, pious postcards and then I asked for a receipt, and the nun said, "We don't give receipts at the Vatican." Which threw me into a rage of like, "I guess not, so you can take this money and funnel it into anti-homosexual groups!" People had to drag me out of there. It's not good for me to go into the Vatican.
The Easter Bunny is a major reason for heroin addiction in America.
People who want to act rich when they're upper-middle class. They try too hard.
You have to think of a new way to completely surprise people who think they're hip. I always said you could make an NC-17 movie with no sex and no violence. Now I don't know what that could possibly be, but if you could think it up, you'd have a hit.
Life is a rotten lottery.
Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership.
Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?
I always say you need something weird on your face and some good shoes and nobody looks in the middle.
So to make movies, if you're first goal is to make money, well you can! Make a tent-pole movie that China wants. But that's not the kind of thing that's really going to get your remembered. You're not going to change anything with that. You might become rich from it!
I get dumber as the day goes along. Every second of the day that goes along, I get stupider.
[My catholic education] sticked with me. It caused the rage I had to make 'Pink Flamingos.'
I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.
My favorite characters are people who think they're normal but they're not. I live in Baltimore, and it's full of people like that. I've also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they're crazy, but they're completely normal.
With Hairspray, we had a great experience. I always think of the last time I saw Divine: He was in the last booth in the back of the Odeon. Now every time I go in there, I look at that table. It was a wonderful night.Hairspray had been out a week; it was a hit. If I had to pick a night that was going to be the last night.
I have no interest in cars. I have a plain, used Buick. I could run over 10 people, and you wouldn't be able to describe my car.
Fame is protection if you go to a scary place. Fame is fun. A lot of people don't say anything and you don't know they know who you are.
I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.
I was thinking about sort of the similarities between "art movies" and lowbrow movies like kitschy sexploitation films. I think they share certain qualities, whether they're hyper-stylized or overly emotive or just very visual.
I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.
I think it's important to visit people in prison. And if you know anyone in prison, I would encourage you very much to visit them. They're a good audience! I always get good letters from prisoners. I don't usually answer them because I have a lot going on in my life, but I get some really good ones, I get some really good letters from prison.
Stop blaming your parents. If you're really angry at 60 years old, you're an idiot! You've got to work some of it out.
I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?
True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.
I learned that people like my work because I praise things that others don't like.
You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.
I've had a pretty amazing life, a good life, and God knows I'm thankful, but I do believe that after 30, stop whining! Everybody's dealt a hand, and it's not fair what you get. But you've got to deal with it.
To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits while watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste.
I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.
I don't trust anyone that hasn't been to jail at least once in their life.
I don't like heroin, unless you're a jazz musician and then you have to be on it because jazz is the sound of heroin.
Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.
I always want to see films that are startling and amazing. Not just shocking. Shocking is easy to do. But startling in the way that makes you change how you think about things. Those are the movies I like the best.
Wouldn't you rather your kid be a drug dealer than a drug addict?
I liked speed. I was on black beauties all the time. Nothing bad happened to me. I didn't become a drug addict because I always had to make a movie. We weren't stoned when we made them; I was stoned when I made movies up. I did them all.
A psychiatrist once told me early in treatment, "Stop trying to make me like you," and what a sobering and welcome smack in the face that statement was. Yet somehow, every day of my life is still a campaign for popularity, or better yet, a crowded funeral.
You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?
Well cult is a word you would never say in Hollywood. In any film business, if you're trying to get your next film made, you would never say, "Oh, my last film was a cult film." I'd say, "Oh great, well I hope this one isn't!"
I have to talk about my movies. I have to give interviews to promote what I'm doing. But no one really knows my personal life. And if you don't have a personal life I feel bad for you.
I haven't changed - the public has. I'm an insider now, which is hilarious.
Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.
"How could you think of such awful things?" liberal critics always ask. "How else could I possibly amuse myself?" I always wonder.
I always wanted to be a juvenile delinquent but my parents wouldn't let me.
God knows if you could start a new sex act that's more important than making a good movie.
I've signed peoples' parole cards at book signings and it's very touching.
So many great people are dead, and so many assholes I know are still alive. Karma's bullshit. I wish it was true, but it ain't.
"Family" this and "family" that. If I had a family I'd be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way "states' rights" was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties.
People that pick up hitchhikers I believe are basically good people that believe in other people and understand problems and don't judge people. That's always the kind of person I'm looking for.
I always feel bad when I meet celebrities and I can just tell every single thing about their personal life, I just say, "Well, they don't have friends. Or a therapist." Once you have both, you don't have to share everything with people, because then you don't have a private life, and then you're, I guess, a workaholic.
I love radical theorists. But at the same time, I don't agree with them a lot, but I love their theories. I love how they intellectualize rage, and this inner battle that such a tiny percent of people really care about. I find that the most interesting.
I'm perpetual tourist, and that's the best way to travel. Nobody gets used to you, you make new friends without having to hear anyone's everyday problems, and you jet back still feeling like a know-it-all.
I would never do hard-core pornography, because it looks too much like open-heart surgery.
I'm trying to do of a certain attitude in life. I'm against separatism. I'm for everyone to gather. I'm for everyone lunatic to hang out together. I want to hear somebody else's bad night, not just mine.
I don't believe in depression. There's no such thing. It's an invention. It's bullshit, it's a cop out.
People vomitied at my movies; not because of the movie but because they were drunk. I took credit anyway.
I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.
I never had any desire to get a tattoo. If I was ever going to get one, I would get a plain anchor with a rope around it, the most unimaginative possible tattoo, like Popeye had.
Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.
If you ever go home with somebody and they don't have books in their house, don't sleep with them. I think that's very important.
It's been 50 years since I was on the roof of my parents' house shooting Hag in a Black Leather Jacket when I didn't even know there was such a thing as editing. I thought you just shot the film and showed it. That's exactly what I did. I'm not that different 50 years later.
I like art that challenges you and makes a lot of people angry because they don't get it. Because they refuse to look at it properly. Rather than open their mind to the possibility of seeing something, they just resist. A lot of people think contemporary art makes them feel stupid. Because they are stupid. They're right. If you have contempt about contemporary art, you are stupid. You can be the most uneducated person in the world and completely appreciate contemporary art, because you see the rebellion. You see that it's trying to change things.
Valentine's Day is my mother's birthday. If I'm wildly in love, I've sent people chicken hearts, which seems to appeal to the kind of person that I've been in love with.
My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you're never around assholes. That's the two things to really fight for in life.
My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste.
When I started my goal was to make a successful underground movie. I started making movies in the mid-60s. Underground cinema then only lasted about two or three years.
I would describe myself as a writer that hopes to take you into my world and help you feel a little safer.
To me, racist jokes are not funny. I am politically correct, in a weird way. I like to push the boundaries that are politically correct.
I wish something on T.V. would trouble me. Then maybe I would watch it.
I respect everything I make fun of.
Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.
The way I photograph... in many ways it's directed by chance and all my mistakes, which are often the best stuff. I found that no matter if it's the same tape, the same TV, and the same camera, I can never duplicate an image... your arm jiggles, there's just too much chance. And I never put it on pause, or use any of that fancy equipment.
The further away I am from water, the less well I do!
Without obsession, life is nothing.
I can't tell the difference between the best and the worst 'cause I realize not everybody wants to have sex in the middle of a demolition derby race in the car.
Just make sure your children hate authority and they'll do fine.
Sometimes I wish I was a woman, just so I could have an abortion.
I could never kill myself. I approve of suicide if you have horrible health. Otherwise it's the ultimate hissy fit.
Insider can be more ludicrous. How did I ever end up [as one]? Carsick [Waters's book on hitchhiking] was on the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks. [One of the characters was] a singing asshole that does a duet with Connie Francis! Times have changed. That's mainstream, in a weird way.
Technique is nothing more than failed style.
Coke didn't last long enough; it gave me a hangover for two weeks for being high for ten minutes.
The first real thing was Divine as Jackie Kennedy [in Eat Your Makeup]. His mother found the bloody Jackie Kennedy outfit in the boot of his car and said, 'What is this?" and Divine said, "I am Jackie Kennedy!" His mother just changed the subject; she didn't know what to say.
I am on the road all the time. Whether I'm in Paris or in a small college town in Texas, I can't tell the difference, and that's good. You don't have to leave where you were born to be cool anymore.
I probably would have made [films] anywhere. Every city has something they're ashamed of. I would have made films about it and turned it into something positive.
Hitchhiking, intrinsically, is sexual and dangerous. At the same time I never really felt scared. I was scared that nobody would pick me up and that I'd be waiting by the side of the road for a week.
I think the extremes are something that's really interesting to see coalesce in movies.
People still come to Baltimore and say, "I didn't realize you made documentaries."
The selfie has become a new autograph, but it takes twice as long to do as a real autograph. I do it because I'm like, "What am I going to do, these people bought me my house." Why am I not going to take a picture with them except I always say, "You have to hold it up! Shoot down or it's really ugly if you shoot up!" So not only does it take longer, you have to teach them camera angles.
Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take them before they bury it.
Going to a sensational murder trial is the only way I can relax.
If you can make someone laugh who's dead set against you, that's the first step to winning them over to your side.
If you want to be an artist, go to every art gallery, if you want to be in movies, see movies! You have to participate in whichever world you're trying to enter! You have to know what's going on. You can be the best artist in the world but if you don't know one thing about which gallery to go to, you're never going to get it shown in the right place. Learn a little bit about the business of whichever art you're trying to get into. Without it, you will be lost.
I'm here today because of LSD. LSD gave me the confidence to be who I am today. Completely.
Contemporary art hates you.
My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior - before the Reformation.
As far as socially redeeming value, I hope I don't have any.
I'm the smartest at 8 A.M. I wake up at 6, drink three cups of Awake Tazo Tea and read five newspapers. I have to think up something every day, Monday to Friday.
The "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" hitchhiker really made people never want to hitchhike again - the hitcher, the show. Hitchhiking is always vaguely sexual.
I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.
There are little things that get on my nerves, like people who have reading material in their powder room. When you go in someone’s house, and next to the toilet they have a huge basket of magazines, I find that repellent. I recommend against straining while reading.
Anyone from my past I'm interested in, I've already stalked their homes. I like to go outside.
I understand why people want to look up their friends - usually they want to see what people they've wanted to have sex with look like.
Once I had a shrink who said, "Your parents are the fuel you run on," because I was raised in the tyranny of good taste. If my parents hadn't taught me all that, I couldn't have made fun of it. So I thank them, and they were loving. It takes a long time to realize that they made me feel safe when I lived a life which was very not safe.
I have no interest in ever making a movie I didn't write. If they were going to take my house away, then I guess I might have to. But my agent knows not to even bother sending me the scripts.
It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.
Irony ruined everything Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be `so bad they were good`. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody's in on the joke now. Everybody's hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.
